Wintrack vs Chennai Customs has unleashed middle class anger. And BJP must worry

It’s hard to build a house, run a business, or do anything without paying bribes. And yet, citizens’ anger about this open, unchecked corruption won’t erupt into Anna Hazare-type rallies.

Custom House, Chennai | Facebook

Remember the public revulsion against corruption that led to the collapse of the Manmohan Singh government’s credibility from 2011 onward?

Well, something vaguely similar is happening again. It’s not anywhere as powerful as the movement that polished off the Manmohan Singh government’s reputation. But you would have to be deaf not to hear the stirrings and discontentment all around us.

Each day, some new incident sparks off more outrage against corruption. This time, it started with a post from a company called Wintrack, which said it would suspend all import-export operations because of a vendetta being waged against the company by Chennai Customs.

The Customs department took this seriously enough to issue a response, but then tried to paint Wintrack as discredited chronic complainers.

But two things caused the issue to explode. The first was that Wintrack had names and specific allegations. The second was that a huge flood of anger against the Customs department came gushing out, with hundreds of people posting their own stories about being forced to bribe officers and citing instances of extortion.

It all reached such a frenzy that the Union finance ministry had to intervene and promise that it would launch a full enquiry into the allegations. The initial dismissive tone of the response from Customs was dropped.

Rate card for bribes

As I write this column, the anger still rages. Everyone, it seems, has a Customs horror story, and while it is possible that many of these are made up or exaggerated, every single person who is posting them cannot be a liar. Some of them must be true. And if heads don’t roll after the finance ministry’s investigation, then the attackers may shift their focus to Nirmala Sitharaman herself.

More worrying for the government is that the newer attacks go beyond Customs to take in the tax officers: income tax and GST. The allegation is that the finance ministry is riddled with corruption, not just among its tax departments but also in the Enforcement Directorate and other organisations that have vast powers.

This outrage emerges at a time when newspapers are packed with reports about civil servants and government officers who have been found to have illegally accumulated crores in cash, hold vast properties, and stash away hoards of gold.

Everyone knows that what even the government’s own supporters call the Inspector Raj has never been more powerful. You want to build on your own land? You must first pay off local officials. You run a small factory? You have to pay off the inspectors, or they will shut you down. No paper of any kind will ever be signed by an official in any government office unless you pay a bribe. That is how bad things have got in India.

A sign of the rot was a report in The Times of India. It said that Mumbai’s builders were concerned that the bribes being demanded by officials (including even the fire brigade) were so high that a delegation of bribe-givers was meeting the bribe-takers to negotiate a reduction in rates. The Times even included a chart listing out the current rates for getting fire clearance, a commencement certificate, title clearance, and so on.

That is how bad things have got in Mumbai: its largest newspaper had to print a rate card for bribes.

You can argue that corruption has long been a way of life in India; that municipal officials have always been crooks, and that some Customs officers have a history of supplementing their incomes with bribes (especially at Mumbai airport, though Delhi remains remarkably clean). And you wouldn’t be wrong.

But this time, there is a difference. The central government has promised us a corruption-free India. In reality, the rate of growth in bribery has far outpaced the Sensex and the rate of inflation. The victims see this as a consequence of the way the government has empowered tax authorities and the unbridled powers it has given to enforcement agencies. Far from cleaning up the system and offering opportunities for growth, it has filled the system with fields of illicit gold and offered gleeful officials massive opportunities for corruption.

What matters to the middle class

So far at least, there is no scope for an anti-corruption campaign of the sort that lost Manmohan Singh the election. In the UPA era, several factors coalesced to create a regime-change fervour:

• A publicity-hungry CAG office, which propounded nonsensical and unsustainable concepts of notional loss
• A fierce and organised social media campaign against the government at a time when the Congress did not even know how to spell ‘Twitter’
• The open hostility of TV channels
• The suggestion that Narendra Modi would clean up India once Manmohan Singh was gone
• Manmohan Singh’s own nervous silence
• The bogus India Against Corruption movement, which was launched either to clear the way for Modi or to advance Arvind Kejriwal’s own ambitions (take your pick), with the support of the RSS and with Anna Hazare as its figurehead

It’s very unlikely that anything of that magnitude will ever happen again in India. And even if it does, Modi is sharp enough to know how to finish off such a campaign.

But what the government is up against here is very different. The Congress is still attacking corruption in macro terms by focusing on the Adanis and Ambanis. However, what seems to matter to the Indian middle class is not that Gautam Adani has made billions or that nationalised banks lent Anil Ambani staggeringly large sums of money that he is still to repay. What matters is the corruption that the citizen faces every day. It’s hard to build a house, run a business, or do any of the things that we are perfectly entitled to do without greasing the palms of officials and inspectors.

The anger that citizens feel about this open, unchecked corruption won’t erupt into Anna Hazare–type rallies. In any case, TV channels have been instructed to play down the issue.

But the anger won’t go away either. It will grow inside the hearts of citizens as they seethe and outrage. If the government does not do something to address it quickly, then it could well cost the BJP the next election.

Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)